When I told her there was a really cool kid’s movie about a funny clown coming on at eight p.m., very close to my grandma’s bedtime, she left me to it. That movie happened to be a miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It, a whopper of a novel I had picked up at the library a few times but never had the courage to dig into, both because of its thousand-pages-plus length and the terrifying things awaiting me inside those pages.
I don’t know why I thought watching it would be any better. I was probably eleven at the time, meaning the miniseries had been out for over a decade, which, to my immature brain, meant it was ancient and corny. I can assure you it wasn’t. To this day, I can’t open a fortune cookie without thinking there’s a big eyeball or a dying baby bird inside. Nor can I pass a storm drain without envisioning a red balloon floating up out of it.
The clown’s name, you probably know, is Pennywise, played by the amazingly talented Tim Curry in the 1990 adaptation, whom I only knew at the time as the dickhead hotel clerk from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York as well as the butler from the movie Clue.
If the dead bodies piled in front of the dollar store weren’t a bad enough omen, the name PENNY WISER’S should’ve been. But I wasn’t a frightened eleven-year-old anymore. I was a man heading into his third decade, a man who was running out of time and energy, a man who had people he needed to take care of.
Using the ski poles for balance, I advanced. The snowshoes took a while to get the hang of, but once I did, I moved so much faster than I would’ve without them. Not exactly twenty-two minutes fast, but fast nonetheless.
My trek here probably took, in total, two hours. I only had to seek shelter once, and it was in a farmhouse about halfway down the main stretch of road that would take me into town. I stayed in that farmhouse for about forty-five minutes before a snatch of sun escaped through the clouds. While I waited, I heard no voices calling my name.
The wraiths were not all-knowing, it seemed. They couldn’t see through walls or sense me, thank God. Still, that didn’t do much to ease my fear. Or shield me from the cold. The jacket and the layers helped some, as did the four walls blocking the killer wind, but in the end I buried myself in stiff hay and tried dozing, one hand resting on the butt of the gun I’d taken from Helga. No sleep came, of course—it rarely did these days—and I was up and moving again before my feet had time to warm.
I checked my watch. At this point, I didn’t have the sun’s appearances down to a science, but I had a pretty good estimate.
In five to ten minutes, it would vanish again and I would be stuck out in the parking lot of Penny Wiser’s, soon to become another dead body to add to the pile staring me in the face.
I moved toward the entrance, giving the corpses a wide berth. The wind was blowing, and I expected their stench to be carried toward me. It’d smell so bad it would rip through the scarf covering my mouth and nose. But that never happened. The cold seemed to have preserved the bodies like meat in a freezer. The thought brought a fresh ripple of chills down my spine.
I kept moving, and as I moved, I switched the pole in my right hand to my left and pulled the gun free from my pocket. I flicked the safety off. Before the storms, I had never shot anything more than an air-soft gun. Not the case anymore. I had shot Ed Hark; I had shot at the ghostly image of the dead boy; and I would’ve shot at the giant spider that chased us across Lake Prism, had Stone not dropped the rifle when I fell through the ice. To say I was experienced wasn’t the right word, but I certainly felt more comfortable with iron in my hand than I did before the shit hit the fan.
I took a deep breath, the air so cold it burned my lungs, and climbed atop the mound of snow. At the apex, I sat down and slid the rest of the way toward the other side. Here was the market’s entrance. The door was iced over; so were the big show windows next to it. I couldn’t see inside and that wasn’t good, but I reminded myself that I’d come too far to turn back now. The town wasn’t big by any standards. My father always said you could judge a town’s size by how many McDonald’s it had. As far as I knew, this place had none.
With a gloved hand, I pulled on the door handle. The hinges groaned and ice fell in sheets. It hit the ground with a muffled thump. Thankfully.
Though I don’t know who would’ve heard the sound of ice shattering. The world seemed completely empty of anything but the wind and the snow.
And the dead. Always the dead.
I gave the door another jerk, and again, nothing happened. I was weak enough as it was, there was no chance I could open it under normal circumstances, let alone while I was close to freezing to death.
It was best not to think. To just act. So that was what I did. I raised the gun and slammed it against the glass. The door shattered completely, the sound carrying for what seemed like miles. I waited a second. Strained my ear for the slightest noise. I don’t know why. I guess I’ve seen too many zombie movies. You know the part I’m talking about, the main character knocks on the door or the window of a seemingly abandoned building, hoping the banging will draw any curious undead out of their hiding spots. The main character waits for a long moment and nothing comes. They think the coast is clear. They think they’ve found the one spot in the ravaged world devoid of zombies. So they go in. A few seconds later they’re walking down the aisles, minding their own business, lulling the audience into a sense of safety, and then— BOOM! Here come the walking dead, and the main characters are straight-up screwed.
Well, that wasn’t exactly my case. Society might’ve froze and millions of people were probably dead, but there weren’t any shambling corpses begging for braaaaaaainnnnnssssss! There was just the snow, the cold, and the wraiths. Since the monsters only came when it was dark, and I still had a few minutes of sunlight, I wasn’t completely panicking.
But maybe I should’ve been.
I stepped around the glass as best as I could, but it wasn’t exactly a precise movement in snowshoes. It crunched beneath my feet. Again, loudly. The store was shrouded in darkness. I could tell it wasn’t much, about exactly what I’d imagine a convenience store to be. Four aisles no taller than me. Coolers in the back stocked with energy drinks, pop, milk, iced tea, and water; a coffee machine near the front counter, which held a cash register straight out of the fifties. But as I swept the aisles with my flashlight, a weight lifted from my chest.
The shelves were fully stocked.
No other survivors had looted the place and cleaned it out. This realization led to a different realization. If the shelves were full and the store hadn’t been hit, that meant…there probably weren’t any other survivors around us. I mean, heading to the only store in town wasn’t exactly a genius idea. I wouldn’t have been the only one to come up with it.
Then I remembered the bodies outside. Maybe those were the others who’d had the same idea as me. The ones who’d failed.
We didn’t know what the wraiths did besides show us our greatest fears, and turn you into a raving mad person if they somehow touched you. I didn’t think they were corporeal enough to actually do the dirty work themselves. Then again…the spider that chased us after we crossed the lake was whole—solid.
I suppressed a shiver and focused on the positives. Like all this food.
I set the flashlight on the counter so it was pointed toward the aisles, lighting up most of the store, and grabbed a handful of white plastic bags beneath the register. I started at the aisle closest to the door.
Bread, buns, bagels, croissants, all of which were stale and soon to be growing mold, went into the first bag. I didn’t care about their freshness. I’d eat mold in a heartbeat if it meant I got to taste a blueberry muffin again.
The rest of the bags—about ten in total—I filled with boxes of rice, canned meat (not exactly appetizing), more cans of soup, vegetables, beans, some potato chips, beef jerky (which I opened and munched on as I restocked; delicious, by the way), bottled water, a couple twenty-ounce cherry Cokes, a half gallon of milk, and a six-pack of Budweiser. After all that, I
circled around to the, in my humble opinion, best aisle of the bunch: the candy aisle.
Geez, man, I grabbed every last Reese’s they had. I love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I don’t think I’m being overdramatic when I say I’d actually die for them. Because it’s true.
In the end, the bag was seventy-five percent Reese’s and twenty-five percent other. Other consisted of Snickers, Peppermint Patties, Butterfingers, Three Musketeers, Milky Ways, and a few Paydays for Stone. Those were his favorite. When I got back to Helga’s, I knew I had a lot of sucking up to do for telling him he’d slow me down. He wasn’t exactly one to hold a grudge, but if you wanted to get on his good side, you could do a lot worse than bringing him a Payday.
After retrieving the flashlight, I took a step toward the door, the bags rustling in my hands, turned, and looked over the store. What I took barely made a dent. That was good, that meant I could come back in a few days and restock even more.
I made it once; I could make it again, right?
I hoped so, but this line of thinking wedged a splinter of doubt in my head.
On second thought…one more bag wouldn’t hurt.
What if another series of blizzards, like the ones that fell on July 4th, dumped more snow on us? No way I’d make it out this far again. Coming here was already difficult enough, and that was after the weather had calmed down slightly, which wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t as bad as those first few days of the—I guess you’d call it the apocalypse—but the wind still howled, the snow was still falling at odd intervals, adding more inches to the many feet already piled on the ground, and the sun showed its face only a few minutes out of every day. The temperature couldn’t have been higher than negative fifteen degrees, either—lower when you factored in the wind chill. The cherry on top of all that, of course, were the monsters.
So yeah, I went back for more food. It was better to be safe than sorry.
I thought it was a good idea, a logical idea, but I wish I had never turned back around. I wish I would’ve just left. Because, If I had done that, I would’ve never seen the man standing in the shadows.
The man grinning at me from the back-left corner of the store.
2
Midnight
It took a moment for what I saw to register. When it did, I dropped the bags. The cherry Cokes hit the tile hard. At least one of them busted open and sprayed fizzy pop all over. The smell reached my nose instantly, sweet with artificial cherries. I barely noticed this. Almost all my attention was directed toward the tall man in the shadows. He was watching me, still grinning a wide, unnatural smile. It was all teeth, stretching ear to ear.
I shined my light toward his feet—not at him. On the off chance this was a regular dude like me, I didn’t want to burn his retinas out. The flashlight, like most of everything in my possession those days, once belonged to Calvin Thompson, the all-knowing prepper, so you can bet your ass that thing could’ve blinded you if you looked straight at it.
The brightness ate away some of the shadows, but it seemed no matter how much light there was, the shadows would never completely go away.
With him more visible now, my mind eased. He wasn’t a monster; not a zombie, a killer clown, or a vampire. He was just a regular country fella dressed in jean overalls with a slim jacket on top. Part of me thought that was odd, the jacket. It was the type more suitable for a crisp fall day, not an apocalyptic winter. Then again, who was ever really prepared for something like what happened? I think even Calvin Johnson would’ve been taken by surprise.
I pressed on. The prospect of meeting another living human being was too enticing.
“Hello? Hey, I’m Grady. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
The man didn’t answer. I wish I could tell you I was already thinking the worst, but these were the early days of the apocalypse, and I was thinking this guy was probably like me: a survivor whose understanding of sanity was slowly ebbing.
“If this is your store,” I began again, “I’m just borrowing a few things. I can write you an IOU. I’m not sure where my wallet is.”
Borrowing a few things? I sounded like an idiot. And what did I expect? Was this guy going to run my debit card through a reader without power? Hell, no.
The man remained silent.
The gun in my pocket grew heavier. The fingers of my off hand twitched. The other shook slightly as I raised the light, settling the beam on this guy’s midsection.
That’s when I saw the bloodstains in the fabric of his overalls. Large semi-connected splotches, like some demented inkblot. My throat went dry. I couldn’t have said anything even if I wanted to.
Now the man stepped forward and spoke through his grin. “Do you worship the midnight hour, my friend?”
“What?” I wheezed, barely loud enough for myself to hear.
An alarm started blaring in my head, and in the span of a second, I slipped into defense mode, the way I had the night Jonas died and I killed Ed Hark.
The guy kept coming, as if in no hurry at all. I shined the flashlight in his face, but the son of a bitch never even squinted.
“The midnight hour is coming. It will not leave us this time. So we must serve the dark, for the dark takes care of all who serve. They are our masters, and we are their slaves…”
I noticed another thing about the guy now that the light was on his face. He, like Ed Hark, looked like walking death. Hell, maybe he was dead. And like Ed, there was a jagged dark line etched in the flesh of his forehead. Not between his eyes like Ed’s had been, but more near his receding hairline. One of the shadow things had touched him and turned him crazy.
I could’ve shot him right then. I should’ve. I didn’t.
I don’t know, I guess I was holding out hope. The man was talking, after all, stringing together coherent sentences, whereas Ed hadn’t.
To me, this guy sounded like he was on some very strong and very illegal drugs. He was fighting it, I thought. Maybe there was a chance he could survive whatever the wraiths did to him.
Rather than shoot him on the spot, I pulled the gun free and aimed at his chest. “You better stop, buddy. Unless you wanna serve the lead.”
A slight smile stretched my lips into a smile. I was proud of that little zinger, until I remembered I wasn’t living in an ’80’s action movie.
The man finally stopped, though he paid no notice of the weapon pointed at him. He showed almost no emotion at all. His eyes were large but seeing nothing besides whatever blissful reward the dark promised him. I thought they were a slight gray color, too. It was like they were crackling with television static.
I kept the gun raised. “Good on you, you’re not completely stupid.” I nodded toward the floor. “Now, I want you to lay on your stomach right there and count out loud to five hundred. If I see you following me, I’m gonna shoot you. No hesitation about th—”
It happened fast. Too fast.
The man’s eyes narrowed, changed from bliss to that of a starving, rabid animal. He lunged forward with a surprising speed I wasn’t prepared for. The temperature outside was somewhere in the negatives, meaning the temperature inside, without running heat and now a broken front door, wasn’t much higher, so I wasn’t exactly warmed up and at my athletic best. This guy had something extra on his side, too. Whether that was the power of the dark or the midnight hour or whatever the hell, I can’t say.
All I know is that when I went to pull the trigger of my gun, he already had an ironclad grip on my wrist. He wrenched my arm upward, and a shot went off. The sound all but shattered my eardrums and sent me into a spiraling daze. Glass from the overhead fluorescents and dust from the ceiling rained down on us both.
Then we hit the floor.
This guy wasn’t a twig, either. Despite his baggy overalls and the jacket, it was safe to say he was pretty well fed. I know this because all his weight crashed down on my sternum, knocking the wind from my lungs and straining more than a few ribs.
My head dribbled off the tile, causing
me to bite my tongue. Warm, coppery blood flooded my mouth. It hurt like hell, but that sharp pain was good; it kept me conscious as my vision went fuzzy.
Here was a flash of the man’s snarling face. There was his twisted grin, and the vibrant red of fresh blood (mine), and the dull red of the stains on his overalls (not mine).
He had me against the ropes, but it wasn’t over yet. I fought. I flailed. I threw my arms upward. We rolled and slammed into the nearest aisle. Boxes of powdered donuts, Twinkies, and Ho-Hos fell from the shelves, landed all around us like rubble in an active war zone. He ended up on top of me, pinning me down.
I couldn’t do much. The fact that my head was spinning and possibly bleeding certainly didn’t help my case. But I kept fighting; it was all I could do. So I threw one of my elbows upward, and it cracked him in the face. A tooth shot out from between his lips, blood and spit sprayed in a mist. Worst of all, the guy barely noticed I’d shattered one of his incisors.
A shot from my elbow proved useless. I needed something a bit more powerful.
The gun…where the hell was it? I needed that damn gun—
Suddenly his hands, also sticky with blood, throttled my throat. Fingers dug into my flesh. I coughed and hacked, was unable to pull in any breath. My thrashing slowed until I almost couldn’t move anymore, but as I turned my head, I saw the gun. It was wedged beneath one of the aisles, half buried beneath the boxes of sweets.
I was trying to pry his hands from my neck, but I let my left hand go and reached for the weapon. It seemed so far away, yet somehow still within reach. Not an optimist and not necessarily a pessimist, but as a realist, I knew my time was running out. I’d never get the gun before I choked to death.
My body went limp. Legs no longer kicked, hands no longer pried at the man’s.
Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter Page 2
